Contents

1 Handling Binary Data with Haskell

Many programming problems call for the use of binary formats for compactness,
ease-of-use, compatibility or speed. This page quickly covers some common
libraries for handling binary data in Haskell.

1.1 ByteStrings

Everything else in this tutorial will be based on bytestrings. Normal Haskell

String

types are linked lists of 32-bit charactors. This has a

number of useful properties like coverage of the Unicode space and lazyness,

however when it comes to dealing with byte-wise data the

String

involves a space-inflation of about 24x and a large reduction in speed.

Bytestrings are packed arrays of bytes or 8-bit chars. If you have experience
in C, their memory representation would be the same as a uint8_t[]
- although bytestrings know their length and don't allow overflows etc.

Their are two major flavours of bytestrings, strict and lazy. Strict
bytestrings are exactly what you would expect - a linear array of bytes in
memory. Lazy bytestrings are a list of strict bytestrings, often this is called
a cord in other languages. When reading a lazy bytestring from a file, the data
will be read chunk by chunk and the file can be larger than the size of memory.
The default chunk size is currently 32K.

Within each flavour of bytestring comes the Word8 and Char8 versions. These are
mostly an aid to the type system since they are fundamentally the same size of

Note that we are using strict bytestrings here. (It's quite common to import the
ByteString module under the names B or BS.)
Since the bytestrings are strict the code will read the whole of stdin into
memory and then write it out. If the input was too large this would overflow
the availble memory and fail.

Let's see the same program using lazy bytestrings. We are just changing the
imported ByteString module to be the lazy one and calling the exact same
functions from the new module:

This code, because of the lazy bytestrings, will cope with any sized input and
will start producing output before all the input has been read. You can think
of the code as setting up a pipeline, rather than executing in-order, as you

might expect. As

putStr

needs more data, it will cause the lazy
bytestring

contents

to read more until the end of the input is

found.

You should review the documentation
which lists all the functions which operate on ByteStrings. The documentation
for the various types (lazy Word8, strict Char8, ...) are all very similar. You
generally find the same functions in each, with the same names. Remember to
import the modules as qualified and give them different names.

1.1.2 The Guts of ByteStrings

I'll just mention in passing that somes you need to do something which would
endanger the referential transparency of ByteStrings. Generally you only need
to do this when using the FFI to interface with C libraries. Should such a need
arise, you have have a look at the
internal functions and the
unsafe functions.
Remember that the last set of functions are called unsafe for a reason - misuse
can crash you program!.

1.2 Binary parsing

Once you have your data as a bytestring you'll be wanting to parse something
from it. Here you need to install the
binary package.
Instructions for installing Cabal packages are out of scope for this tutorial.

The binary package has three major parts: the Get monad,
the Put monad and a general serialisation for Haskell types. The
latter is like the pickle module that you may know from Python - it
has it's own serialisation format and I won't be covering it any more here.
However, if you just need to persist some Haskell data structures, it might be
exactly what you want: the documentation is
here